We're reporting live from the Wakefield 2008 show floor and you can catch up with the latest news, theatre talks and gossip from the link below. A preview of the show is here and a full report will follow later. Photos may well also appear below too, if you're lucky.

We'll be filing copy via mobile phone and taking notes in show presentations. Feel free to say hello if you recognise any of us. Many thanks to readers who donated cash to Drobe this year - it helps pay the bills for covering RISC OS shows.

There was supposedly work done on a Linux version, (presumably much would be common with the Mac version) Apparently the reason it wasn't released was due to worries about supporting the variety of Linux systems available.

If this was the case, the supporting a single platform via a reseller would not have the same issue.

Our eeePCs (RISCBook Mini) default to 630Mhz (70Mhz fsb) but have dynamically switchable performance profiles which allow for closer to the 900Mhz full. We don't allow absolute max speed as many machines fail around 850+ mhz, but being able to dynamically switch up the CPU performance is a good thing, I think. HOWEVER, at the show, we ran at 630Mhz to be "fair" in our demonstration.

NOTE, it's a heck of a lot of work to get do the RISCBook Mini working like this (several days per machine). We even have about 600Mb of free internal disc space after installing XP, windows updates, OpenOffice office suite, RISC OS, internet software, Acrobat viewer and AV software. If you consider that just installing Windows and doing a Windows Update will normally crash with "disk full", you'll understand why this is quite an achievement.

Oh, and there's also a bunch of custom stuff under the hood to make it all hang together properly. VA has a habit of crashing without that (on the eee), so I was glad when it all came together. (Uh oh, that sounded like an A-team quote)

arawnsley: One assumes you're using a custom Windows installation? I seem to recall the Eee can netboot. A few hours of effort setting up a network installation server, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to install all that software precisely to your specification using BartPE.

For windows on a standard 4Gb EEE you need to nLite it or something similar.

The new 900's come with 20Gb SSD (linux)n or 12Gb SSD (windows). So these should be better.

In reply to Andrew. Apparently you get more stability moving from the standard 667 Mhz RAM to 800Mhx RAM when increasing speed.

One word of warning on the 4Gb machines (linux). Domt update everything using synaptic on Xandros, simce many updates are added to the user space and not the protected unionFS space. You can quickly fill up a disc that way.

The boot time for the original xandros is 15 secs but I'm going to sacrifice boot time and move to Mandriva. Ges I know I'm better with a fast slacky, but there ain t one for the EEE.

Richcheng - we've been selling the RISCBook Mini for about 3 months now, and I have stock (really!). However, the big problem is making the price competative - the cost of RISC OS and Windows (plus VAT) adds a lot, and that's before I start to cover the time involved.

fylfot - wider PDF format variety, control over image compression, better handling of source documents (works round a few problems in Ghostscript), preview at various stages so you can see what screwed up and where, UI that "remembers stuff" for more rapid generation of PDFs, quick and easy installation/operation. To name a few. Sold out by lunchtime. Of course, it's nothing you can't do other ways, so probably not worth your time (wink)

Not quite sure why eeeuser.com would want to know about RISC OS on a eee? But yes, the 900 series does look good, the only caveat being that another 15-200 would net you a 12" RISCBook with DVD, more RAM, 160Gb drive and full resolution display (1280x800), and a dual core CPU. The question is, where do you draw the line?